er, both are wanting, and
that, if they once part company, each of them must die.

When, at the termination of my brief apprenticeship, the time came for
me to leave the school and to part from Miss Effie,--she to go to her
elegant home, I to the little old brick house in the fields, and with
prospects so entirely different from hers,--I am sure it was the hardest
trial I had yet been called upon to bear. I should never see her again.
I had no longings for the life she led; for as yet I had harbored no
other thought than that of perfect contentment with my own. But her
society was so delightful, the tone of her mind so lofty, her
condescension so grateful, her whole manners so captivating, that I
looked upon her as my guide, philosopher, and friend, and I cried
bitterly when I left her.

MEMORIES OF AUTHORS.

A SERIES OF PORTRAITS FROM PERSONAL ACQUAINTANCE.

MISS LANDON.

With unmingled pain I write the name of Laetitia Elizabeth Landon,--the
L. E. L., whose poems were for so long a period the delight of all
readers, old and young.

We were among the few friends who knew her intimately. But it was not in
her nature to open her heart to any one; her large organ of
"secretiveness" was her bane; she knew it and deplored it; it was the
origin of that misconception which embittered her whole life, the
mainspring of that calumny which made fame a mockery and glory a deceit.
But I may say, that, when slander was busiest with her reputation, we
had the best means to confute it,--and did. For some years there was not
a single week during which, on some day or other, morning or evening,
she was not a guest at our house; yet this blight in her spring-time
undoubtedly led to the fatal marriage which eventuated in her mournful
and mysterious death.

The calumny was of that kind which most deeply wounds a woman. How it
originated, it was at the time, and is of course now, impossible to say.
Probably its source was nothing more than a sneer, but it bore Dead-Sea
fruit. A slander more utterly groundless never was propagated. It broke
off an engagement that promised much happiness with a gentleman, then
eminent, and since famous, as an author: not that _he_ at any time gave
credence to the foul and wicked rumor; but to _her_ "inquiry" was a
sufficient blight, and by _her_ the contract was annulled.

The utter impossibility of its being other than false could have been
proved, not only by us, but by a dozen of her inti